The Weblog of Erik J. Barzeski

In trying to troubleshoot my two-month-old MacBook Pro with TouchBar (2018)1, I tried booting into Single User Mode. This had previously worked, but for some reason, it now boots right through it. The text appears on the screen, small like always, and then I get the progress bar and the computer prompts me to log in with the normal login screen.

The MacBook Pro has a T2 chip and thus has the boot security, but those are set to Full Security.

FileVault is not enabled. I've checked that a few times.

I'm not sure what's going on here, but the inability to boot into Single User Mode (cmd-S during startup) is troubling.

Footnotes

The front-right USB-C port has never worked - no power, no data, nothing.↩

One Response to "Mojave Boots Right Through Single User Mode"

Turn on your Mac, then immediately press and hold Command-R to start up from macOS Recovery.

Select Disk Utility from the Utilities window, then click Continue.

From the Disk Utility sidebar, select the volume that you're using, then choose File > Mount from the menu bar. (If the volume is already mounted, this option is dimmed.) Then enter your administrator password when prompted.

Hmmmm. And oddly, this page says that with Verbose mode, cmd-v, you can enter Unix commands.

Update: Verbose mode boots right through to the user login screen, just like it always has. Single User Mode now requires the method above - cmd-s and cmd-v seem to do the same thing in Mojave with my 2018 MacBook Pro.